KANISHKA, king of Kabul, Kashmir, and north-western India in the 2nd century A.D., was a Tatar of the Kushan tribe, one of the five into which the Yue-chi Tatars were divided. His dominions extended as far down into India as Madura, and prob ably as far to the north-west as Bukhara. Private inscriptions found in the Punjab and Sind, in the Yusufzai district and at Madura, and referred by European scholars to his reign, are dated in the years five to twenty-eight of an unknown era. References by Chinese historians to the Yue-chi tribes before their incursion into India, together with conclusions drawn from the history of art and literature in his reign, render the date given the most probable. Kanishka's predecessors on the throne were pagans; but shortly after his accession he professed himself a Buddhist. He spent vast sums in the construction of Buddhist monuments; and under his auspices the fourth Buddhist council, the council of Jalandhara (Jullunder) was convened under the presidency of Vasumitra.
At this council three treatises, commentaries on the Canon, one on each of the three baskets into which it is divided, were composed. King Kanishka had these treatises when completed and revised by Mvaghosha written out on copper plates, and enclosed the latter in stone boxes, which he placed in a memorial mound. For some centuries afterwards these works survived in
India ; but they exist now only in Chinese translations or adapta tions. We are not told in what language they were written. It was probably Sanskrit (not Pali, the language of the Canon). This change in the medium of literary intercourse was partly the cause, partly the effect, of a complete revulsion in the intellectual life of India. The reign of Kanishka was certainly the turning point in this remarkable change. It has been suggested that the wide extent of his domains facilitated the incursion into India of Western modes of thought ; and thus led in the first place to the corruption and gradual decline of Buddhism, and secondly to the gradual rise of Hinduism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.-Vincent A. Smith, The Early History of India (1924) ; "The Kushan Period of Indian History," in J.R.A.S. (1903); M. Boyer, "L'Epoque de Kaniska," in Journal Asiatique (Igoo) ; T. Watters, On Yuan Chwang (London, 1904, 1905) ; J. Takakusu, "The Sarvastivadin Abhidharma Books," in Jour. of the Pali Text Soc. (1905), esp. pp. 118-13o; Rhys Davids, Buddhist India (London, 1903), ch. xvi., "Kanishka."